Thread by @GilesUdy

And how…
So much of my research mirrors this. One influential speech last year to a group of British Caribbean-origin churches in U.K. inflaming them against the CofE was based on so many sheer inventions, I cannot let it pass. 1/

Ht @G_S_Bhogal

Honestly I’d be the last to defend the CofE on so many grounds but Prof Sir Hilary Beckles, Vice Chancellor of the Uni of West Indies, leader of the Caricom reparations campaign, & an eminent knighted historian, accused the CofE of the following serious charges, all untrue: 2/

1. The CofE “was one of the largest slave owners in Barbados”
- At emancipation there were 83,000 slave on Barbados, just 411 on the estate left to the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel. (Not excusable but context important see no 10 below) 3/

2. The CofE was a “critical architectural [&] economic part of slavery”
- Of 750,000 slaves in the Caribbean the SPG had 411
- Of 47k compensation payments at emancipation, 97 clergy received £
- that’s 97 out of 6,300 CofE clergy
4/

3. The Bishop of Exeter received “the largest amount of reparations for slavery, more than any other one in England”
- in fact he owned NO slaves, got no £.
- he was the co-executor of a will of someone who did.
- he presented petitions in Parliament AGAINST slavery 5/

4. The CofEs involvement in slavery was so extensive it couldn’t “move against it… criticise it” and took this position “in Parliament.”
- In Parl 1806 the Bishop of London, 3rd senior in CofE decried its “injustice, inhumanity [&] cruelty ”
- Numerous other eg’s in Hansard 6/

5. The CofE “was silent” (no it wasn’t) because it “was complicit in slavery for 300 years” (no it wasn’t) - see my tweets above and below.
7/

6. The CofE believed black people “should remain in slavery”
- No it didn’t
- Bishop of London in Hansard again: “maintained that the slave trade was not countenanced by anything in Holy writ”
He was the senior bishop regularly in the Lords. He spoke for the CofE. 8/

7. The CofE “would brand their African slaves with a hot iron that said ‘Church of England’.”
- the brand was “Society”.
- it was done by local mangers not the SPG without their knowledge
- when the CofE/SPG chaplain on the estate discovered it he put an immediate stop to it. 9/

A word about the Codrington estate: It was left to the SPG the overseas arm of the CofE in 1711 in the will of a man who wanted to found an order of medical missionaries to help slaves. The will stated 400 were to be kept on the estate to fund that. 10/

The SPG took it on believing they could create a model of a humane plantation and influence planters to become more compassionate towards their slaves. In 1711 few few outside the slave trade understood it’s actual cruelties but it’s still very alien to our minds that they 11/

… should have thought that. The fact that, had they tried to free the slaves, the will would have been challenged and the estate passed to others & the slaves recaptured doesn’t absolve them of guilt but it was not a wilful entry into the trade 12/

The past is indeed a different country.
What is wrong *today* is that one of the most eminent figures in West Indian intellectual and political life is whipping up British black churchgoers to demand massive reparations from the CofE - all to fund British black youth to 13/

… return to the West Indies to study at Beckles’s own university.
(🤔…)
While on the subject of the reparations Beckles says are due, it’s worth rising above the heat to some actual figures from archival sources: /14

The SPG/CofE received £8558 compensation for the Barbados slaves in 1835. But..
Over the next 10 years it disbursed £61625 to the estate & £171777 (£200m ttl today) in the rest of the West Indies to build schools, churches, and clinics to help the slaves build a new society.
/15

Which brings me back to this. It’s taken me longer to write this thread than Beckles to give his speech. No wonder bullshit goes unrefuted. None of the dozens of pastors, bishops, and members on zoom would have doubted the word the leader of the Caribbean reparations campaign /17

You can take it for granted that gotcha facts which are actually fiction will be all over twitter but from someone reputed to be an eminent historian? And this damaging?
They have to be confronted. 18/
@calvinrobinson @Emma_A_Webb @NigelBiggar @History_Reclaim

Postscript: the CofE’s handling of the Codrington bequest, no matter how well intentioned at the beginning, was a mess and a failure. It can be explained, it can be retold in its context, but can’t be defended. It was criticised by figures within the church even at the time. 19/

Until the evangelical revival in the later 18thC, the CofE as a whole was in a mess. George III even had to write to the Archbishop of Canterbury to express his shock at reports of wild parties at Lambeth Palace. But those clerics were no more representative of the proper 20/

… church then were the handful of clergy who admired the USSR, declared it was merely the sermon on the mount made manifest, and who held memorial services for Stalin in his death. 21/

The Archbishop of Canterbury was right to apologise for the Codrington affair in 2006 but it was not nearly as major, wicked or intentional as it is commonly (mendaciously?) represented. It was 200 years ago so can we please move on? /22

On the value of the SPG funds put back into the West Indies, the National Archives currency converted makes the value today just over £15m. But the UCL slavery compensation database uses a different calculation which would make it £200m /23

And don’t start me on the so-called ‘Slave Bible’, supposedly proof that a bible with all the freedom bits removed (they weren’t) was used to deliberately make slaves submissive… 🤦‍♂️
Another day… /24

Longer to tweet and far far longer (months) to research it all and find out how untrue it all is.

PS it’s not my habit to be rude in tweets - I meant to put the bullshit bit in inverted commas as a quote of the tweet. It was not meant to sound so personal. My mistake. /25

https://twitter.com/gilesudy/status/1439243387559890946

@threadreaderapp unroll pls